A Lawyers View of the Risk of Black Hole Castastrophe at the LHC, page 1

www.physorg.com...

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Quote from source:
PhysOrg.com) -- Just bringing up the topic of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) creating a black hole that destroys the Earth might seem unscientific and out of place on a science news website. After all, the subject is generally considered to be out of place in the particle physics community, since peer-reviewed studies have shown that there is no significant risk of an LHC doomsday scenario.

But, right or wrong, many people continue to voice their concern about the LHC’s potential to produce a worldwide catastrophe. Some of these concerns clearly go overboard, stemmed by fear and ignorance. In the midst of this extremism, is it possible for someone outside the physics community to analyze the LHC’s risk of producing an Earth-swallowing black hole in a rational way?

Eric E. Johnson, an assistant professor of law at the University of North Dakota, has undertaken this task from a legal point of view. He has recently published a paper in the Tennessee Law Review in which he investigates how the courts might handle the LHC case and other future cases of largely unprecedented, potentially dangerous sci-fi-like experiments. The 90-page paper is highly readable for non-scientists, and is available at arxiv.org. Johnson, who admits that he is “unanxious” about a doomsday scenario, has two reasons for writing the paper: first, to present a kind of case study for debate among lawyers; and second, to prepare to solve such a legal case in real life.

“I intend to provide a set of analytical and theoretical tools that are usable in the courts for dealing with this case and cases like it,” Johnson writes. “If litigation over the LHC does not put a judge in the position of saving the world, another case soon might. In a technological age of human-induced climate change, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificially intelligent machines, and other potential threats, the odds of the courts confronting a real doomsday scenario in the near future are decidedly non-trivial. If the courts are going to be able to play their role in upholding the rule of law in such super-extreme environments, then the courts need analytical methods that will allow for making fair and principled decisions despite the challenges such cases present.”

I thought I would bring this to light as I have heard people talking about how the LHC is going to kill us all or eat the Earth, etc...

I thought rather than fighting and trying to tell you I would let the experts speak their piece.

I mean seriously you think all of these highly educated scientists are going to risk their lives and the lives of their loved ones by creating a black hole on Earth? Seriously?

The Science....

In his paper, Johnson begins with an overview of the background of the LHC, as well as the lab at which it’s located, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. This overview is followed by a short history of one of the LHC’s predecessors, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and then a brief explanation of alleged dangers such as strangelets, magnetic monopoles, bosenovae, and vacuum transitions. Regarding the safety of these potential disaster scenarios, CERN’s argument is the same for each of them: high-energy cosmic-ray collisions (which are similar to those produced in particle colliders) have been occurring in Earth’s atmosphere throughout the planet’s history - so anything dangerous that the LHC could create would already have been produced by cosmic rays long ago. The fact that the Earth still exists is living evidence of the safety of these scenarios.

The question of the black hole risk came up recently in 1999, inspiring particle physicists at the RHIC to analyze the possibility. They found that the forces created by modern accelerators were insufficient to create a black hole - at least in a four-dimensional world. Shortly after, physicists found that black holes could be produced if there were extra dimensions, a possibility in some theories. In light of these findings, CERN physicists reexamined the safety issue and found that the LHC would likely produce black holes, but that they would rapidly evaporate due to Hawking radiation.

The only reason this is even a question is because we haven't seen this on a magnitude like this before. But that's the point Scientists think that it will be safe and they are the ones with an education.

If more people understood the science behind this, there would be less worry.

This is what science needs and will open a whole other world for us. People need to understand this and they will when we get it up to full power.

Get ready today could be your last.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

[edit on 26-1-2010 by predator0187]